Easy Digital Image Cataloging - The Next Killer App?
Wired News: Kodak Focuses on Sifting Pix
The massive collection of photos available in Granny's picture drawer (I feel like I should trademark that - "Granny's Picture Drawer") and the photo albums and envelopes amassed by her, my mother and me are something I have wanted to tackle for awhile. Now the chance for some help in that arena is apparently drawing nigh. Some type of automated general organization of all these images would be a godsend. From there, I can sit with Granny and Jules and write captions and even record stories about the images. Granted I can (and probably should) do these things now. But, getting the jumpstart that Kodak's new technology seems to be about ready to offer would be awfully nice!
The massive collection of photos available in Granny's picture drawer (I feel like I should trademark that - "Granny's Picture Drawer") and the photo albums and envelopes amassed by her, my mother and me are something I have wanted to tackle for awhile. Now the chance for some help in that arena is apparently drawing nigh. Some type of automated general organization of all these images would be a godsend. From there, I can sit with Granny and Jules and write captions and even record stories about the images. Granted I can (and probably should) do these things now. But, getting the jumpstart that Kodak's new technology seems to be about ready to offer would be awfully nice!
New hardware and software still in development digitizes old snapshots and extracts information from photos in order to automatically organize them.
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Along with digitizing the images, the scanning software also assigns each image a tag based on the decade in which the photo likely was taken.
How does the software figure that out? Photographic paper styles have changed over the years, and the software gauges the size and shape of a print to guess when the image was made. It further narrows down the date based on whether the print is color or black-and-white.
The scanner also reads the backs of prints and eventually should be able to pick up watermarks such as "Kodak Paper" and handwriting such as "Uncle Jimmy 1957" to help identify photos.
Kodak is also looking at the fronts of pictures, with a technology called "scene recognition." The first phase, on display Tuesday, can analyze a face in a photo and find other pictures of that person in a collection.
